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A week or two ago, Microsoft
made a slew of announcements all aimed at creating a consistent story
around hybrid cloud services. It’s a compelling product launch, and one
which, frankly, takes Microsoft which was only a year or two ago one of
the key whipping boys for the cloud cognoscenti, to a place of real and
credible solutions. So, what did Microsoft announce? System Center 2012,
an enhanced Windows Intune, Windows Azure services for Windows Server and some other smaller offerings, taken as a whole deliver a range which according to Microsoft means’

customers can shift from managing datacenter components
separately to delivering resources as a whole, including networking,
storage and compute. Cloud infrastructure capabilities such as
multitenancy, software-defined networking and storage virtualization are
built in and ready for automated, hybrid cloud environments… customers
can centrally manage cloud-based applications and resources running in
their datacenters, on a hosted service provider datacenter or on Windows
Azure. By integrating service provider cloud capacity and management
directly into their operations, enterprises can extend their datacenter
capabilities. Administrators can move virtual machines to Windows Azure
and manage them from within System Center, based on their needs…
Customers can also use System Center 2012 SP1 to back up their servers
to Windows Azure to help protect against data loss and corruption.

A converged hybrid cloud is something that a number of traditional
vendors (most notably HP) have been articulating for awhile – it’s worth
having a look at what this release means in terms of the Microsoft
proposition for customers looking to balance existing on-premise assets
with public and private cloud utilization. Part of this convergence is
the enabling of BYO strategies and the easing of the management burden
across a wild array of different devices and operating systems.

MyPOV

The key to success delivering solutions to existing organizations
with legacy assets (at least in the medium term) is the ability to
deliver a consistent platform across customer’s own data centers, those
of the service providers they use and the public cloud itself. A model
which sees management and automation as part of an offering across
varied infrastructure does much to reducing the heavy lifting for IT
administrators – while it’s still a step from a completely self-service,
higher-level proposition (to which, in the future at least, PaaS will
be the answer) it does deliver a level of agility and flexibility to
organizations that are trying to navigate a considered, gradual and
de-risked IT re-engineering project.

It’s also a smart strategy for Microsoft who get to both leverage the
existing use of their products within organizations, but also to
provide a compelling proposition for hosting service providers who can
now go to market with public cloud services that have a consistent story
for prospects with existing assets. In the face of large vendors
selling a largely cloud-centric product line, this provides a point of
competition for hosting providers – an interim step for sure, but one
which at least buys enough time until there is more clarity about what
organizations long time IT makeup will look like.

There has always been a concern amongst pundits about what Microsoft
would do to balance existing channels, their own direct to customer
offerings and existing infrastructure assets, this new focus on a
consistent converged cloud story makes sense, and should see them
continue to justify their place in organization’s IT budgets.

The Cloud Zone is brought to you in partnership with Internap. Read Bare-Metal Cloud 101 to learn about bare-metal cloud and how it has emerged as a way to complement virtualized services.